At a recent set of focus groups –  you know where a small group of subjects is quizzed on a particular subject while being scrutinized through one-way glass by a smaller group of people hoping for insight that can be extrapolated across thousands — I heard confusion arise.  The facilitator said: “6 cents in every 100 dollars,” but it kept being played back as “6 percent in every 100 dollars.”

Big difference.  How come?  For nearly 60 years we have seen the meaning of numbers and percentages overtaken by the importance of the argument they are used to promote.  The focus group insight is: we are all guilty.  One reason may be how the apparent objectivity of numbers lends credibility to any argument no matter how contorted the equation that produced them.

Go back to 1954, when Darrell Huff and Irving Geis published “How to Lie with Statistics.” It kicked off a trend of adding math to marketing.

Here is how the book opened:

“‘There’s a mighty lot of crime around here,’ said my father-in law a little while after he moved from Iowa to California.  And so there was — in the newspaper he read.  It is one that overlooks no crime in its own area and has been known to give more attention to an Iowa murder than was given by the principal daily in the region in which it took place.

“My father-in-law’s conclusion was statistical in an informal way.  It was based on a sample, a remarkably biased one. Like many a more sophisticated statistic it was guilty of semiattachment: It assumed that newspaper space given to crime reporting is a measure of a crime rate.”

Guarding against the urge to confer credibility on every random column of numbers that “foot” — add up correctly — puts a burden of all of our five senses.  If extra sensory perception is the ability to see things without evidence or experience, it may take that sixth one to protect us from ourselves.

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Plug the word “context” into the Google News search box today and you’ll get 32,769 results.  This is a continued uptick, 7 percent over a week ago.

The totals continue to be led by coverage of Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor as we get close to the Senate vote on her confirmation.   The man who nominated her, President Barack Obama, is a close second.  Driven by the persistence of the “birthers” who claim the President is really foreign-born and the noisier arguments over health care reform.

One interesting note is that the concept of context is moving off-shore.  In New Zealand, it is reported that the unemployment figures are not as bad as they seem.  They need to be seen in context.  This is no sleight-of-hand, but a realization that information isn’t insight until it is seen in context.

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Type the word “context” into the Google News search box today and you’ll get 28,829 results.

The impending Senate hearings on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a key driver this week, as were the Independence Day weekend announcement by soon-to-be-ex-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and the Obama/Medvedev summit in Russia.

The number of results had been holding steady in recent weeks at about 32,000, but the 10 percent drop this week may not mean less emphasis on the value of context, but its unspoken inclusion in ever-widening set of human, industrial and political issues.  Health care reform has not yet taken center stage, but it is unlikely that it will compete in the near term with the stories of the McNair homicide and the Michael Jackson memorial at the Staples Center in LA.

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Type the word “context” into the Google News search box today and you’ll get 30,628 results.

The death of the self-proclaimed “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson, House passage of a climate bill and the continued fall-out from the Iranian crack-down on those protesting the outcome of the recent election there were the drivers this week.

The number of results has been holding steady in recent weeks, but the value of context continues to be applied to an ever-widening set of human, industrial and political issues.  With the debate over health care reform moving into its battle over health care reform phase, that may be the driver that prompts a real uptick in our ticker.

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Word came today via blog and cable news that Republicans have determined President Obama to be vulnerable on the subject of deficits. The current conventional wisdom is that the President’s popularity — at 67 percent — seems to leave little room to maneuver, but 51 percent of us don’t like how much he’s spending and 48 percent think him wrong on the size of the debt that spending has incurred.   And from that platform the opposition can make its case  — or so goes the thinking.

No one in this current economy can be happy with debt.  But put in context, the responsibility for the burden might be seen to be on another’s foot.

Under former President George W. Bush, the national debt hit $10.6 trillion.  Under President Obama, the debt now totals $11.4 trillion.  Massive and an increase of $800,000,000; a lot of zeros.

What that means is for every dollar of debt we owe, we owe $.93 to Bush policies and $.07 to what Obama hath wrought.  In this light, one could argue that the Republicans are clinging to a very slender reed, indeed.

It is all in the way you look at it — and present it.  But then we’ve known that since 1954 when “How to Lie with Statistics” first hit the shelves.  Of course, in 1954, the national debt was “just” $280 billion or 2.5 percent of today’s total.

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We have known for 100 years, thanks to Mark Twain’s “Chapters from My Autobiography,” that there are three kinds of lies; “lies, damned lies and statistics.” At the very least, statistics — numbers in general — can be, uh, misleading. Take, for example, the recent noise over tea bagging.

Whether brewed up by Fox News and kept warm in the cozy of MSNBC’s criticism, the grassroots uprising over taxation and federal spending drew a lot of attention because they drew a lot of attendees, didn’t they?

Basking in its election day success with numbers, the political website 538.com became the non-partisan source of just how many people attended the 500 events staged nationwide. Right now that number stands at 311,000. Big.

Unless you consider that the same day there were a mere 14 Major League Baseball games (excluding one rainout) that drew 360,000 people. Bigger; especially in context.

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